Freedom of speech in South Africa

We should thank Justice Malala's parents for the name they gave their child in the dark days of apartheid. There was no crystal ball to see that a future ANC government would feel the need to pass its own draconian secrecy law (The shame of South Africa, 24 November).

As a white student in the 1960s, a personal experience shook me into understanding the powerful link between freedom of speech and the right to hear. Helen Joseph came to talk at my university about the banished people, whom she had gone to find after her previous banning order had expired. I listened in shock that such things should happen in my country. The next day the shock spread to my guts when I saw the newspaper headlines. Helen Joseph had been re-banned and placed under house arrest. Yesterday I had heard her. Today I could not.

Unfortunately, the majority of black South Africans, beset with pressing problems of poverty, have still to realise that freedom of speech issues are not an esoteric middle-class concern. So too the ANC MPs who jeered the South African National Editors' Forum members who walked out of parliament in protest at the new law. It's easy, maybe tempting, to shoot messengers who bear bad news. Before the bill goes before the second house of parliament, the ANC should return to the historic Freedom Charter (still on my wall): "The law shall guarantee to all their right to speak, to organise, to meet together, to publish…"Beverley NaidooBournemouth